Author: David Applegate

Dr. Emanuel’s real reason for discouraging annual physicals seems to be his expert-driven insistence on making Obamacare work despite the odds. In essence, the Affordable Care Act is yet another wealth transfer scheme, from the healthy to the sickly, from the middle class to the lower class.

More

Apart from his halting, staccato, eight-to-ten-word phrase delivery when not reading off a TelePrompTer, President Barack Obama has two noticeable and telling verbal tics. The first is “folks”; the second is “just some guy.” The first is just an annoying and apparently insincere way of trying to show that, despite being President, he’s really, you know, just one of us. But the second is a tell-tale sign that he’s throwing somebody under the bus.

For as Blow then recounts, Obama’s 2013 response to Republicans was: “You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election.” Which Republicans, of course, promptly did, in both 2010 and 2014.

Writing in The New York Times on Monday, November 3, 2014, from Durham, North Carolina, Professor David Schanzer and his student Jay Sullivan suggest that, by U.S. Constitutional amendment, the country should eliminate midterm elections. Instead, they suggest, Congressional representatives and Senators alike should hold four- or eight-year terms coincident with the President’s and be elected only when American voters also elect a U. S. President.

The United States is now manifestly seen as a weak horse even by its allies, a nation in military retreat throughout the world against its three most dangerous adversaries: Russia, China, and militant Islamic fascism.

Among its 645 pages of new red tape for power plants, the EPA states that its proposal “would result in significant reductions of GHG [Green House Gas] emissions that cause harmful climate change, while providing states with ample opportunity to design plans that use innovative, cost-effective strategies that take advantage of investments already being made in programs and measures that lower the carbon intensity of the power sector and reduce GHG emissions.”

Coming thirteen days after state and federal income tax returns were initially due, Tax Freedom Day, according to the Illinois Policy Institute’s Senior Budget and Tax Policy Analyst Benjamin VanMetre, marks the point in the year when Illinoisans have worked long and hard enough in the aggregate to cover their share of state, federal and local taxes “and can start keeping their hard-earned money.” About a third of Illinois residents’ efforts this year – 118 days’ worth out of the calendar year’s 365, in other words – went just to paying taxes.

With all the talk of America’s forgotten middle class, it’s worth taking time as we begin a new year to consider that the country’s seeming obsession with wealth and inequality may instead be turning the U. S. into a country with only two classes: the governed and the governing.

Once one properly understands wealth, it makes absolutely no sense for governments, churches, or other institutions to think they can make the world or the country better off by confiscating wealth from some people and giving it to others.